1. Field of the Invention
The instant disclosure relates to a method of fault determination by analyzing compressed raw fabrication data representing an operating parameter of a semiconductor fabrication process; more particularly, to a method and system of compressing raw fabrication data having high compression ratio and low distortion rate that represents operation parameters of a semiconductor fabrication process for fault determination.
2. Description of Related Art
To maintain manufacturing competitiveness, semiconductor manufacturers must seek reduction of its production cost by approximately 25˜30% annually. To enhance equipment efficiency and lower production cost, companies such as AMD, IBM, INTEL, and SEMATECH have been researching on topics such as in factory control, integrated metrology, and automated monitoring system. In particular, the control theory of Advance Process Control, or APC, is especially favored by the semiconductor industry. One of the process control tools of the APC is fault detection and classification (FDC). The FDC helps to minimize unscheduled downtime and detect equipment issues more quickly to reduce scrap, thereby ensuring the product quality. Started at research level, the FDC process has been applied widely in industrial practices.
However, the FDC process often requires the recordation of an excessive amount of data, which in turn takes a long time to download and analyze. The long waiting time is not effective in providing real-time monitoring and improving fabrication parameters efficiently, besides wasting time and labor. The large amount of data also makes data analyzing more difficult.
To address the above issues, the inventors strive via industrial experience and academic research to provide the instant disclosure, which can effectively improve the limitations described above.